1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to reading and navigating media on small devices.
2. Description of Related Art
In our fast paced society, user attention is an increasingly scarce resource. As a result, many people turn to tools and devices that can help them perform multiple activities at the same time. For example, commute time on trains is frequently used to catch up on reading. During trips many people use laptops to extend their workspace into the semi-public spaces of airplanes, trains and buses.
Commuters and others use conventional audio books, books on tape, iPod and MP-3 files and similar works to complete continuing education requirements on trains, airplanes, or during other travel time. These conventional audio works allow people to perform incidental commute-related tasks such as monitoring train or bus stations, navigating transportation connections while simultaneously reviewing news, fiction, or professional information using conventional audio-tape players, CD-players and the like.
While these conventional devices have advantages in terms of cost and ubiquity, they fail to support key reading operations, such as skimming, browsing, and navigating, or focusing on specific parts. For example, conventional audio books and similar materials do not easily integrate diagrams or other visual elements typically used in lectures, seminars, newspapers and the like. Thus, handouts or detailed audio descriptions of the relevant diagrams must be produced off-line. This increases production and delivery costs.
Moreover, the reverse, play, forward and stop navigation controls of these conventional devices are ill-suited to reviewing cognitively dense material. Users of cognitively dense materials browse, search and skim through the work for relevant content. However, reading platforms such as conventional audio-books do not provide dynamic structural orientation and/or navigation within the work that easily supports these tasks. The difficulty a user experiences in orienting themselves within a work coupled with the difficulty of finding and re-starting the audio work at the relevant bookmarked location reduces the effectiveness of these conventional reading devices. These challenges may be exacerbated in a mobile context where the user is prone to interruptions or the need to tend to other things in the environment. For example, a user may have to tend momentarily to things going on in the environment—e.g. “Is this my train stop coming up?” and is likely to stop listening. Thus, systems and methods that support the navigation of page-oriented information assets using visual orientation and navigation cues would be useful.